Is Blindness Really a Deficiency?

In the past decade or so, significant advances have been made in the area of germinal choice technology, which allows parents to influence the genetic constitutions of their children. Strides such as "in-depth genetic testing, sophisticated preimplantation diagnosis, egg banking, improved in vitro fertilization, and cloning are poised to transform our reproductive choices," (Stock, 554) and these advancements are making the future of germinal choice technologies quite real and pertinent. Gregory Stock, a UCLA scientist and vocal spokesman for the proliferation of germinal choice technologies, suggests that through the use of these technologies, we can create a stronger and better human race. Stock manages to break up germinal choice technology into three degrees of use, based on "the degree to which the altered quality is health-related, and the magnitude of the embodied changes." (Stock, 556)

At one end of the spectrum is germinal improvement that Stock believes will be universally accepted, namely the restoration of lost capacities - eliminating blindness or deafness within future generations. In the middle of the spectrum are improvements that make the underperformers and sub-par individuals perform averagely and the average persons display elite performance. The other extreme are improvements that grant persons superhuman powers, powers that even today's elite would be unable to display. While it is obvious that there is much controversy over the last two degrees of germinal choice technology, even controversy exists over the most basic one, the seemingly simple and logical correction of such deficiencies as blindness and deafness. Many blind people live extremely comfortably without sight, as they develop what Oliver Sacks, clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, refers to as the "inner eye." "Isolated from the outside, the visual cortex becomes hypersensitive to internal stimuli of all sorts: its own autonomous activity; signals from the other brain areas - auditory, tactile, and verbal areas; and the thoughts and emotions of the blinded individual." (Sacks, 485)

This creates the inner eye phenomenon, which enables the blind to experience their world in a visual context despite their lack of sight, and allows many blind people to perform in ways that sighted people could only hope to replicate. As Arlene Gordon, a blind woman in her seventies that loves to travel, and is loved by her travel companions for her ability to, through her detailed questioning, highlight minute niceties that would otherwise be overlooked, so perfectly phrased it, "'Too often people with sight don't see anything!'" (Sacks, 483) Blindness cannot fairly be categorized as a biological deficiency, as many blind people are empowered far beyond many sighted people in the realm of visualization, and so the elimination of blindness through the use of germinal choice technologies would unreasonably and unjustly make extinct a functional, albeit different, sect of mankind, and potentially limit and endanger the future evolution and well-being of the human race.

Everything we see in ourselves and in the biological world around us is a product of variational evolution. Random mutations occur in nature and the process of natural selection selectively retains traits that are helpful for the survival of the species in question. Variational evolution is a machine, and it has but one job: to yield "increasing adaptation to changing local environments, not predictable progress in the usual sense of cosmic or general betterment expressed as growing complexity, augmented mentality, or whatever." (Gould, 199) Creatures adapt to their environment through variational evolution; there is no eventual end to the process, no climax of advancement, no "perfect" creature. This concept is crucial to understanding the idea that blindness is not necessarily a deficiency, but could indeed be the future of the human race. One assumes that because eyes are extremely complex organs, they must be a step in the right direction, as far as evolution is concerned. Complexity, however, is not at all an indicator of evolutionary advancement, as is exhibited by the results of a 1999 study regarding a group of microscopic parasites, the Dicemida, which exist as amongst the more simplistic mesozoans, anatomically speaking.

For this reason, their anatomic simplicity, the Dicyemida have always been thought of as primitive or intermediate organisms on the evolutionary tree. This was, of course, until the aforementioned study uncovered a Hox gene within the Dicyemida, a gene only occurring in upper-level mesozoans. "Thus, the dicyemids are descended from "higher," triploblastic animals and have become maximally simplified in anatomy by adaptation to their parasitic lifestyle." (Gould, 208) The dicyemids evolved into more simplistic creatures as a result of their lifestyle, as parasites in the renal organs of squid and octopuses. What must be realized is that an evolutionary development is always a step in the right direction, as evolutionary developments are products of what the environment demands and absolutely nothing else. By this same logic, however, one can imagine an instance where the environment demands sightless humans. If by this point in time, germinal choice technologies have succeeded in eliminating this so-called deficiency, humankind is in for a rude awakening, as it will have effectively removed itself from the destination-less track of variational evolution and natural selection. And as even an eight-grade science student can tell you, this is extremely bad news.

The idea of an environment demanding humans that lack sight does not seem quite so implausible when the abilities of blinded persons who embrace their inner eye are taken into consideration. Jacques Lusseyran was a blind French Resistance fighter who embraced his blindness as a tool more than a deficiency. Lusseyran describes his mind as a "'screen' upon which whatever he thought or desired was projected and, if needed, manipulated, as on a computer screen." (Sacks, 484) This screen was not like a blackboard or a picture, where it is limited to an enclosed frame - it was always as big as it needed to be and it was everywhere, an entire universe just for Lusseyran's personal use. As Lusseyran described his mastery of his inner eye, "'nothing entered [his] mind without being bathed in a certain amount of light...In a few months [his] personal world had turned into a painter's studio.'" (Sacks, 484) It was this powerful ability for visualization that enabled Lusseyran to aid the French Resistance as he did, "visualizing people's position and movement, the topography of any space, visualizing strategies for defense and attack." (Sacks, 485)

He also used the synesthesia (combining of senses) he experienced with his blindness to unite his senses of smell and hearing in order to detect falsehood and possible traitors to the movement. While this idea of synesthesia seems a bit far-fetched, it is actually not an extremely uncommon characteristic of blind people. Dennis Shulman, a blind clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, described:
"how the heightening of his other senses had increased his sensitivity to moods in other people, and to the most delicate nuances in their speech and self-presentation. He could now recognize many of his patients by smell, he said, and he could often pick up the states of tension or anxiety which they might not even be aware of. He felt that he had become far more sensitive to others' emotional states since losing his sight, for he was no longer taken in by visual appearances, which most people learn to camouflage. Voices and smells, by contrast, he felt, could reveal people's depths. He had come to think of most sighted people, he joked, as 'visually dependent.'"

Lusseyran described his experiences with visualization and synesthesia as "the gifts of the blind," and he warns against the "idol worship" of sight. As young Lusseyran wondered when comparing his visual experiences with a friend during a walk through nature and realizing that his were more vivid, "'which one of us two is blind?'" (Sacks, 485)

Germinal choice technologies will surely eliminate blindness. Gregory Stock attempts to say that because some parents (generally the blind ones) may want their children to be blind as well, and to prevent this would border on eugenic control, we will not be completely eliminating deficiencies such as blindness in humankind. This logic is flawed, however, because naturally some blind parents will choose to give their children sight, while not very many sighted parents will choose blind children, and so slowly the amount of blind people will deteriorate until they are nearly extinct. Not only is this unfair for the blind citizens of the world, but it could be hazardous for all of humanity. After considering Lusseyran's case, where his adept ability for visualization made him an adept military strategist and an icon for the French Resistance, or Dennis Shulman's case where his senses were heightened and so powerful that he could sense people's feeling that they themselves could not sense, or the case of Zoltan Torey a blind Australian psychologist who developed his visualization abilities to the extent that he could replace the entire guttering on his roof in the dark of night by himself, the idea of blindness being a potentially useful trait within the human species seems quite plausible. Blindness could be exactly what the environment demands at some point in the future, and germinal choice technology could endanger the future of humankind by seeking to eliminate blndness.

Works Cited

Stock, Gregory. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." The New Yorker, July 28, 2003. 48-59.